Background
Alfred Horsley Hinton was born in 1863 in London, United Kingdom.
Alfred Horsley Hinton was born in 1863 in London, United Kingdom.
Alfred Hinton attended art school with the hopes of becoming a painter, and became proficient in oil, watercolors, and black-and-white drawing.
By 1882, Alfred Hinton had discovered photography, and was hired as editor of the Photographic Art Journal in 1887. He briefly worked for a company in Blackfriars selling photographic equipment before taking over a branch portrait studio of Ralph W. Robinson in Guildford in 1891. In 1893, Alfred Hinton was hired as editor of The Amateur Photographer, a position he retained for the rest of his life.
During the late 1880s, Alfred Hinton became one of a growing number of photographers who believed that photography should be considered a form of high art, a movement that became known as pictorialism. Pictorialism, according to Alfred Hinton, employed "the image of concrete things to create abstract ideas." He exhibited several photographs at an early-1890s Leeds exposition described by his contemporary, Alexander Keighley, as the first pictorialist exposition, and was one of the original members of the Linked Ring, an organisation formed in 1892 to promote photography as a fine art.
Alfred Hinton helped organise the Photographic Salon in 1893, and became the primary English correspondent for the Bulletin of the French pictorialist group, the Photo Club of Paris.
Hinton's staunch defence of pictorialism gained him numerous enemies. His attempt to join the Royal Photographic Society touched off a fierce debate among the readers of the British Journal of Photography, with numerous letters written both in support of his membership and against it. He was a member of the Royal Photographic Society between 1889 and 1893.
During the early 1900s, Alfred Hinton was a regular contributor to the London Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Graphic, and the Yorkshire Post, and was frequently called upon to judge photo contests. In 1904, he oversaw the British photographic exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair, and he spent his last years writing manuals ("Little Books") to teach photographers basic techniques.
In February 1908, Alfred Hinton fell ill while returning from a trip to the Scottish Photographic Salon in Aberdeen, and died at his home in Woodford Green.